Seattle's Pulitzer-winning cartoonist David Horsey's latest cartoons and commentary on politics and current events

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Liberty, journalism and Sam Zell

Who is Sam Zell and why should you care? The answer to the second part of that question is easy: the health of our nation depends on an informed electorate and an informed electorate depends on an unfettered news media willing to tell people more than what they want to hear.

The answer to the first part of that question is that Sam Zell is the most vulgar embodiment of a pervasive bean counter mentality that is threatening the best of American journalism.

At the end of 2007, Zell concluded a sweet deal to take over the Chicago-based Tribune Company — sweet, because he did it with a small amount of his own money. He leveraged the deal by borrowing billions of dollars from the Tribune employees retirement funds (how this is legal, I cannot fathom). Now he is master of a media conglomerate that reaches 80 percent of Americans through 23 televisions stations and 11 daily newspapers.

What does Zell know about journalism? No more than any other billionaire real estate mogul. But that hasn’t stopped him from telling off journalists at some of the country’s best newspapers — the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Hartford Courant, the Baltimore Sun and, finest of all, the Los Angeles Times. Zell has told these new employees of his that they are practitioners of an arrogant kind of journalism that doesn’t give readers what they want and fails to make increasing company profits a key objective of news gathering.

As I detailed in my cartoon, Zell has delivered his message on a grand tour of his properties, dropping F-bombs all along the way. Worse than his crude language, though, is his vision of the future of journalism. Apparently, foreign coverage and reporting from Washington, D.C., will be discounted. Stories that seek to protect the public interest by tackling tough, important subjects will be frowned upon, unless they can somehow be shown to enhance the bottom line.

Yes, Zell wants to give people what they want. That’s not such a radical idea. From comics to horoscopes to gossip columns, newspapers have always done that. But Zell’s diatribes imply that should be the only way to define news. He seems to believe it is arrogant to say people don’t always know what they want or need to know. I’d argue that is not arrogant, it is a simple fact of communication. None of us — journalists included — know everything we need to know. We depend on people who are better informed to tell us many important things. It has always been the job of reporters to inform themselves and then to pass on that information to readers in an intelligent, fair way. It has also been the vital role of newspapers to act as watchdogs, to let corrupt politicians or corporate crooks know they are being observed by people who buy ink by the barrrel. I’m sure Zell would deny he is undercutting that role of the media outlets he now owns, but the fact is, the job cannot be done by newsrooms without the manpower to do it and without the assurance that traditional journalism will be honored rather than derided by the man at the top.

No one would dispute that newspapers are in dire trouble. Profits and readership are falling fast. But publishing pap will not bring them back. People still value serious and substantive information. Newspaper web sites are booming. What is missing is a new economic model for the news business. That’s what a smart businessman like Zell should be working on. Sure, journalists need to adapt to new ways of delivering information to an audience that can access a world of information with a few clicks of a mouse. But dumbing down the news product is the dumbest idea of all. It won’t bring in the profits wheeler-dealers like Zell crave. It will, however, imperil our free society.

There is a reason Thomas Jefferson said, if given the choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he’d opt for the latter. Jefferson knew there was nothing less at stake in that equation than our very liberty.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..